“Kin and Kind” is an article in the Mar 5 New Yorker by Jonah Lehrer, on the remarkable career of E.O. Wilson and his quest to explain apparent “altruism” in animal behavior. The reigning explanation for evolution is pure competition, and he’s beginning to think there must be more to it, asking “…is goodness an adaptive trait?” I note that the very first ecologist to study complex ecological behavior, S.A. Forbes, had much the same way of raising the question, in 1887.
The question, possibly, is not how mutations affect behavior, but our having not looked squarely at what is common to the behaviors of life that are so successful.
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for The Mail,
E.O. Wilson is remarkable among scientists for being willing to question his own dogma. Where the article ends is with his next seeming breach of scientific etiquette, his now beginning to ask if “goodness is an adaptive trait”.
Very surprisingly, that is where the very first scientist to study complex organization in ecologies, S.A. Forbes actually began. In 1887, in “The Lake as a Microcosm”, Forbes observed that somehow networks of many species evolved to respect each other enough to not make food chains highly unstable, as they would be if their competition had winners. Continue reading Kin and Kind – Some learning in progress?→
In “Beyond Firm-Level Sustainable Capitalism” John Fullerton reviews “Sustainable Capitalism” by Generation Investment Management LLP, as still not respecting our finite world. Maximizing long term gain doesn’t make it sustainable, for example, given the difficulty people have had identifying future liabilities for currently profitable plans. I add a graphic example, of how defining the world as what we know about it is deceiving, and results in:
simply enormous omissions from the information set we usually think of as needed for making good decisions
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It’s great to see such a solid critique of Generation’s “Sustainable Capitalism”, that on the surface seems like remarkably responsive to environmental issues as an investment strategy, far more than than ANY sustainable investment plan of ten years ago. The whole attitude toward avoiding environmental conflict, as a business strategy, may be applied inconstantly today but seems to have really swept the corporate world too.
With more and more information, and noticing that much of it travels in circles, there’s both “information overload” and “separate information worlds”, causing the communication of ideas to lose resilience. They’re barriers to communication, and can easily turn into “worlds of miss-information” leading everyone in them astray.
there’s both “information overload”
and
“separate information worlds”
CLAY JOHNSON has good links and discussion on the problem , relating to his interesting “Information Diet” book and “Information Diet Pledge“. By self-selecting our information sources we can create a world of miss-information for ourselves, so he suggests some rules for a healthy information diet. I wrote him the following comment on the “next steps” his “Information diet remainders“. Below that is my comment on his radio program on WNYC on 2/9/12.
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Clay, There’s an easy step beyond noticing that no one is really the author of information that travels in circles. It’s seeing that the author is really the social network it develops in, using the information as part of a social story of one kind or another.
People speaking different languages have different realities.
The next step is noticing that such authoring social networks and cultures invent rather strongly held circles of storytelling, which are very different from each other’s. They become the “reality” the culture creates and form “silos” of thinking that people in them are then structurally separated from others by. Continue reading Coping with every culture having a different reality! (& what’s multiplying them)→
The theme of the AAAS meetings next week in Vancouver is “Flattening the World: Building the Global Knowledge Society”.
Reality math combines the information we do have, with what definably remains missing from our view.
There’s a method of “reality math” that allows “whole system accounting“, to combine both what we know and what we can know is missing. That’s possible for systems defined by energy conservation. Failing to include what’s visibly missing from our data, often how energy is being used by systems that act as wholes, seems responsible for much of why our global solutions are not working, but create even more problems.
With all our information, “new math” is still needed for
what goes on within natural systems still remaining in the dark.
The following is a comment on society president Nina Fedoroff’s editoral in Science about it: The Global Knowledge Society. I certainly agree that global networking potentially allows global problem solving, but… There are “very large holes” in our information. The general “Natural Systems Theory” behind this view is a versatile scientific method, based on using the implications of the conservation of energy to locate and help study the wealth of complex natural organization hidden within the eventful systems by which our world works.
This is an exchange with Frits Smeets on Azimuth, John Baez’s wide ranging mathematical physics blog. The original topic is the 12/13/11 “What’s up with the solar transition“, and why isn’t it happening when seeming so “logical” to so many.
The basic problem is that systems that are highly organized as cells of complex relationships and work by themselves, like the great proliferation of systems that develop by growth, the working relationships between their internal parts is untraceable. So other parts of the universe “out of the loop”.
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In a world of systems leaving us “out of the loop” an observer’s view is riddled with holes, like Swiss Cheese!
The exchange starts on that topic, and in the last two entries turns to the deeper problem of why the natural holes in our information about nature are missing from the physicists notion of a world describable by equations, or “phase space”. fyi, you might browse at the start and read carefully toward the end.
Holes in our information for things built from the inside. (Oh gee, never thought of organization as something different from enumeration.... )
From a Pharaoh hardening his heart to confused children refusing to budge… complexly organized systems pushed to their limits often display emergent rigidity.
Things that develop their organization by new parts being added to existing ones, develop accumulative designs that become harder to change over time. It leads to organizational rigidity, that can either be seen as inhibiting change or enabling structure. These are aspects of the systems physics of self-organization.
Accumulative designs become harder to change over time
Crystallization works by replicating a pattern from a starting pattern, that remains the origin of the pattern throughout the process, like the process that creates snow flakes of a single design. It’s similar with road systems, that as you add connecting roads it becomes both unnecessary to add more and harder to change the established network.
Even with advanced computers the world financial system gets built around trusted expectations, leaving a rigid imprint of past thinking in our models for the future. If it becomes unmanageable and overwhelmed by floods of new kinds of information the models don’t contain, the system is not designed to make any response.
At the limits of Lucy’s organizational abilities, confusion reigned
Organizational rigidity is natural, and develops in any system built by accumulation. A bureaucracy may be built to be very efficient and resourceful, for example, in responding to the original scale and kinds of demands. It’s initial designs may have been highly versatile for the variety of problems it started with. It naturally becomes mired in inefficiency at some natural point of piling on ever increasing demands of new kinds.
2. Marc Calabria is a researcher at the CATO Institute who emphasizes as discussed on the PBS Newshour 11/24, the importance of addressing the stubborn structural causes (being widely ignored) of the growing inequity and instability, that are no one’s fault.
I quite agree with where each starts, and then draw the picture showing how our situation displays a direct conflict with nature, and a puzzle for how to apply the universal solution for ourselves.
Recognizing the natural mechanics of growth economies that would give us leverage and choice in the outcome.
Putting it together "From Scratch" from two different starting points.
The authors of “The Story of Stuff” published a nice little update called “The Story of Broke”, about the vast sums of money the government spends on subsidizing private business…. This sequel “Part II (the end of broke)” was first posted in a comment, on how the still bigger story of broke, debt piling on top of debt, both was missing from the list of now overwhelming government costs, and has a … very natural end. Government debt provides guaranteed growing returns, whether the economy grows or not. Lenders take government interest payments and add them to what they lend back, multiplying their lending and returns. It builds up, slowly at first then explosively, as the world’s debt burden
grows on little but the good faith and credit of government guarantees.
You’ve heard of government debt called a “safe haven”. It’s where investors put money to be “safely assured of ever multiplying returns” when they can’t find even better growing returns elsewhere. Where that debt spiral comes from and goes to has been a subject of many have tried to explain. The view Keynes came to, that I think is the most clear headed of all, outlines the necessities for surviving a debt spiral for a market economy. Nature would surely not shape her facts of life on earth for our approval, but most people react to the facts of life for surviving debt spirals as if to reject nature’s requirements as “socially unacceptable”, … apparently not seeing Keynes’ elegantly clear logic. So this is written in the story telling style of Free Range Studio in their Story of Stuff. —
The End of Broke, the True Whole Story of Debt!
The BIGGER “Story of Broke” is one that starts quite small, but is designed to actually keep growing ever bigger. As it does so it also casts its own vote in the story of business influence in government and demand for subsidies and preferential services, persuading government that’s the way to get money to pay its ever growing debt! It’s the story of how a small amount of debt naturally grows relentlessly big, with no natural end other than either creditors spending it or both government finance and economic collapse.
Drowning in the spiral of dreams
The whole story of debt is a very very simple little thing. It’s that some of us earn by $units and others by $%’s… and by providing guaranteed returns to lenders, in an economy you can actually earn by $%’s till the economy collapses. What seems like a totally innocent “little difference” in measurement, between units and ratios, makes AN INFINITE DIFFERENCE over time in life. Some people have called it “our misunderstanding of the exponential curve”, others simply call it “greed”. The problem with this kind of greed is how very addictive it is and that it grows explosively, making a “little greed” become SO.. GREEDY, with its promise to multiply the rewards of greed forever. Continue reading the Story of Broke – Part II (the end of broke)→
The first learning steps beyond the impasse, on a new path.
Well, shutting down the world for repairs would be conceptually neat, but does not seem to use the path finding mechanisms that nature typically uses. She offers myriad examples of how run-away growth systems can change by maturing to become stable self-managing ecologies. That’s what we need to do, and learn how to mimic, that our culture knows little about, importantly because science has avoided studying the opportunistic learning of natural systems all but entirely.
I know this approach is problematic for someone accustomed to representing systems with equations. Real ecosystems are niche making learning and development processes, though, largely involved in “rule making” not “rule following” . The far better conceptual models for them are of collective learning and environmental development. Collective learning and development systems can cling to one systematic behavior while it is useful, and the break from it to find and cling to another model, when that is opportune, because the parts are actively learning as they go. Continue reading Can we shut down the system for repairs?→
New systems science, how to care for natural uncontrolled systems in context
